You Asked: What is Gerson therapy?

What sort of treatment do you think cancer patients would receive at the Gerson Institute in San Diego? Actually, they would receive no treatment at all, because the “Gerson Therapy” is not sanctioned in the United States. But they would receive plenty of information about traveling to Gerson clinics in Mexico or Hungary, as well as about providing basic “Gerson care” for themselves at home. The Institute does not limit itself to providing information about cancer. It seems the Gerson therapy is effective against virtually every disease. How can this be? Because “it restores the body’s incredible ability to heal itself with no damaging effects, and rather than treating only the symptoms of a particular disease, it treats the underlying cause of the disease.” Right. And the tooth fairy leaves coins under the pillow.

Cancer is a terrible disease that often defies conventional treatment. But the failure of science-based medicine can mean success for the marketers of “alternative” therapies who are unencumbered by the need to furnish evidence. They just have to clamor about how conventional doctors slash (surgery), burn (radiation) and poison (chemotherapy) their patients, hastening their demise, while they offer kinder, gentler, life-saving “natural” treatments. Desperate patients, they well know, will do desperate things. At any cost.

The “Gerson Institute and Cancer Curing Society,” as it officially call itself, adorns its seductive brochure with the credo, “healing with nature.” Aside from the absurd, but appealing notion that “nature” is more adept at healing disease (which it incidentally causes with reckless abandon through natural bacteria, viruses, fungi and moulds) than research-based medicine, one has to question the “natural” aspect of the Gerson regimen.

Is the squirting of coffee up one’s rear end “natural?” What about gulping desiccated liver capsules? Or administering ozone rectally? All these have been part of the program. To say nothing of drinking several glasses of raw calf liver extract a day! That lunacy was given up after several patients’ deaths were linked to a bacterial infection associated with the extracts. The foul liver juice was replaced by a more taste-bud friendly green leaf-apple juice blend, a dozen glasses of which have to be downed to “flush the toxins” responsible for cancer out of the system. Just what these toxins are is never addressed. But to make sure they are eliminated, patients are also dosed with pancreatic enzymes, iodine, vitamin B12, niacin, thyroid hormone, potassium, coenzyme Q10 and organic flax seed oil. Of course all of these bizarre interventions would be acceptable if the treatment worked. Let’s face it, conventional chemotherapy is no picnic. But there is a difference. Chemotherapy at least, has a chance of working.

As the name suggests, there actually is a person behind the Gerson therapy. An established physician, Dr. Gerson fled his native Germany when the Nazis came to power and eventually settled in New York in 1936. As a young doctor he had been tormented by migraines and had sought relief by experimenting with different diets. He traded in his wursts, schnitzels and sauerbraten for a plant based diet that apparently resolved his migraines. Gerson theorized that contamination with artificial fertilizers and pesticides was responsible for his misery. He began to prescribe his “natural” plant-based diet to other migraine sufferers who soon claimed to experience all sorts of additional benefits, including resolution of tuberculosis. Needless to say, there was no objective evidence that any patients had actually been cured in this fashion. How could there be? TB, a bacterial infection, cannot be cured by diet.

And then Gerson had an epiphany. If TB responded to his regimen, why not cancer? By 1958 he had published his book, “A Cancer Therapy,” in which he described curing fifty patients of terminal cancer. That astounding claim prompted the U.S. National Cancer Institute to undertake a review of Gerson’s cases with the conclusion that the validity of the cancer diagnoses and the supposed cures could not be substantiated. Gerson retorted that the review had been unfairly influenced by the “cancer establishment,” for the simple reason that his natural cure was a threat to the grotesque profits realized by the pharmaceutical industry from its expensive but useless chemotherapeutic drugs. That tired old refrain has practically become the anthem of the “alternative” medicine community.

The problem with the Gerson therapy, as now promoted by his daughter Charlotte, and practiced in the Mexican and Hungarian clinics, is not that it is scientifically implausible, nor that it is tortuous to follow, nor that it is repugnantly expensive. The problem is that there is no evidence that it works! The Gerson clinics make all sorts of claims about euphoric patients returning home, cured of their disease. But no follow-up is ever carried out. And whenever independent researchers have tracked Gerson patients, they have found that most had succumbed to cancer within five years of having been “cured” of the disease.

Of course there is even less information available about the success or failure of the “home” version of the Gerson therapy. Administering coffee enemas at home may be a bit of a challenge, but the juicing can be done. Not with any old juicer, though! No siree. We are told that “Dr. Gerson’s research indicates that it is imperative for cancer patients to have a two-step juicer with a separate grinder and hydraulic press. One step juicers generally do not produce the same quality of enzyme, mineral or micronutrient content.” Really? I don’t seem to be able to find that bit of research in the peer-reviewed literature.

The Gerson website actually recommends a specific juicer that will run you in the neighbourhood of $2000. Surely, though, that’s a bargain if it will help you beat cancer. Don’t even think about buying a cheaper juicer, though, because as the Gerson Institute’s captivating brochure tells us, “in fact some patients have failed to experience results simply by using the wrong juicer.” Yup-that must be why they failed to cure their cancer. Wrong juicer! Those cutting-edge researchers at the Gerson Institute surely would not lie to us, would they?

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